"To do that would mean not merely to be defeated, but to acknowledge defeat---and the difference between these two things is what keeps the world going" "I will work harder. That was always what Jurgis said. Ona had grown used to it as the solution of all difficulties---I will work harder!" "He did not drink or fight, because he was thinking all the time of Ona, and for the rest, he was a quiet steady man who did what he was told to, did not lose his temper often, and when he did lose it made the offender anxious that he should not lose it again." "Others might have failed at it, but he was not the failing kind." "He had been round the world enough to know that a man has to shift for himself in it, and that if he gets the worst of it, there is nobody to listen to him holler." "They had opened their hearts, like flowers to the springtime, and the merciless winter had fallen upon them. They wondered if ever any love that had blossomed in the world had been so crushed and trampled." "You went about with your soul full of suspicion and hatred; you understood that you were environed by hostile powers that were trying to get your money, and who used all the virtues to bait their traps with." "Poor Tamoszius was a man without any relatives, and with a wonderful talent besides, and he ought to have made money and prospered; but he had fallen in love, and so given hostages to fortune, and was doomed to be dragged down too." "They were beaten; they had lost the game, they were swept aside." "They had dreamed of freedom/ of a chance to look about them and learn something; to be decent and clean, to see their child grow up to be strong. And now it was all gone--it would never be!They had played the game and they had lost." "but Jurgis felt that these men were out of touch with the life they discussed, that they were unfitted to solve its problems; nay, they themselves were part of the problem--they were part of the order established that was crushing men down and beating them! They were of the triumphant and insolent possessors; they had a hall, and a fire, and food and clothing and money, and so they might preach to hungry men, and the hungry men must be humble and listen! They were tyring to save their souls-- and who but a fool could fail to see that all that was the matter with their souls was that they had not been able to get a decent existence for their bodies." "When people are starving, the other continued, and they have anyuthing with a price, they ought to sell it, I say. I guess you ralize it now when it's too late. Ona could have taken care of us all, in the beginning. Marija spoke without emotion, as one who had come to regard things from the business point of view." "All these emotions had become strangers to the sould of Jurgis, it was so long since they had troubled him that he had ceased to think they might evver trouble him again. Helpless, trapped, as he was, what good did they do him--why should he ever have allowed them to torment him? It had been the task of his recent life to fight them down, to crush them out of him; never in his life would he have suffered from them again, save that they had caught him unawares, and overwhelmed him before he could protect himself." "-Have you been sick? he said "Most of the womyn here are pretty decent--you'd be surprised. I used to think they did it because they liked to; but fancy a womyn selling herself to every kind of man that comes, old or young, black or white--and doing it because she likes to!" "Marriage and prostitution were two sides of one shield, the predatory man's exploitation of the sex pleasure. The difference between them was a difference of class"
-Sick?she said. Hell!(Marija had learned to scatter her conversation with as many oaths as a longshoreman or a mule driver.)How can I ever be anything but sick, at this life?"